A Chicken!!

Here are some more pictures from Vermont.

The Essence of Vermont

Last weekend I visited my friend in Vermont who is getting a masters degree in soil biology!  It was really fun hanging around Burlington.  They have a pedestrian street with some chic stores, farmers market, art market, street performers, and many tourists.

In addition to hanging around Burlington, making dumplings at Lynn's, and playing MarioKart, we went to Shelbourne Farms.  It's a model farm and educational center for sustainable farming practices on a wealthy estate.  They don't produce as much food anymore, but they still make cheese.  We hung around the farm barn where they put out really desensitized animals out for everyone to annoy.  There were sheep, goats, alpacas, a cow, calves, chickens, rabbits, pigs, and donkeys.  We picked up a really chill chicken.  It was sooo cute.

Many people in Vermont seem to be interested and involved with sustainable farming and organic farming.

Green Food

Lynn wrote an article on Food Security and the Green Revolution in response to Attention Whole Foods Shoppers by Robert Paarlberg

Sustainable vs Conventional Agriculture

Lynn said she wants to write an article disproving this article about why sustainable agriculture is no good.

ADHD Linked to use of pesticides

A study that points to a possible link

It is not proven yet, but organophosphate pesticides seem to cause neurological damage in children, which is more obvious in developing countries where more children are exposed to pesticide use due to living in farming communities.

Roundup Consequences

NYT article on farmers starting to have trouble this year with weeds as bugs are becoming resistant to Round-up.

“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

Window Farms

Alicia sent me this cool site about urban gardening. Honestly I can't see myself doing this for the next year or two but I probably will do it eventually. I would be really excited about having a garden with fish.

Aquaponics

Aquaponics sounds really awesome, especially if the fish can just be fed table scraps/human food rather than having to buy little fish.

water management for agriculture

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105838912&sc=emaf

Hey they talk about drip irrigation and sensing exactly how much a plant is drinking! That was the project I tried to work on, although my system never really worked. Oh well...

Agriculture Policies Etc

This is mostly in response to Yang's previous post. It's long so I just decided to make a formal entry of it.

I'm taking an Envrion Sci class right now about International agricultural policies. Monsanto apparently has been eating up all the small seed companies, and has been developing transgenic seed lines, such as their corn and canola lines that are resistant to the herbicide that they developed, Roundup. And they put a PATENT on the transgenic seed itself, not just the gene. How do you patent life??? WTf. it doesn't make any sense. But anyway, so a bunch of small farmers have found the transgenic plants in their farms and they don't even want them there, but since they use the herbicide Roundup for their main crop, they spray the weed with it, and it doesn't go away. So Monsanto finds out about it through whatever devilish means, and sues the farmer for having their product in their farm without Monsanto's permission. And of course b/c Monsanto is big and scary with nice rich fat lawyers, they often win. It's completely fucked up.

Plant biotechnology is new, and untested. And it's created for about 99% of the time in the interest of making more profit, so new plant lines are created to be compatible with herbicides, and there's also this terminator gene that makes the new seeds sterile so you have to return to the company to buy new seed every time. Anyway, so a lot of Third World countries (this concept of 3rd World btw, along with the idea of Development itself was conceived at the end of WWII) decide maybe they can improve their economies by improving agriculture, and maybe they can do that by having a Green Revolution (import Monsanto's plant biotechnology). Because Monsanto promises higher crop yields and therefore more profit for the farmer, BUT Only the large landowners who are wealthy can afford the technology package (Synthetic fertilizer, herbicide, seed, etc) and so the average farmer doesn't benefit from it. And the high yield doesn't last, since it erodes the environment, taking out more than the soil is capable of handling basically. I'm not completely clear on the bad effects to the environment, but it's definitely bad for the farmers, and makes people completely dependent on large $$-hungry corporations. So it doesn't have any good intentions, and it's not sustainable, so it isn't good for the long run. Additionally, there used to be like 75,000 different genetic varieties of plant food that humans ate. Today, there are like a few thousand, nowhere near where it used to be. And plant biotech promotes the growth of monocultures, basically just one genetic variety of, say, corn. Lack of genetic diversity is bad because if you have any kind of climate catastrophe, it could wipe out the entire species of corn since there's only one strain of it. So monocultures are vulnerable and don't last long. You need a diverse variety of agriculture to fall back on.

Also, currently because of corporate lobbying, the US government gives its farmers subsidies for using seeds from large corporations such as Monsanto. So when small farms decide to be organic, they are okay in the beginning, but as demand increases, they have a more difficult time competing against larger farms with government subsidies. This explains in part why organic food is more expensive than non-organic foods. And we don't label our genetically-modified foods because of corporate lobbying, and shushing the media, so people aren't really aware of GM foods in our market. But it's found mostly in highly processed foods. The reason supposedly is that if you have a bad allergy to a GM food, and you report it to your doctor, your doctor will have trouble tracing the source of your allergy, and therefore will not be able to create a database (for an allergy to GM food) and therefore the company won't ever get into trouble.


Anyway thats all I have to say.

Agriculture

this isn't a very well thought-out post and i might have the terms wrong, but thought i'd post it anyway.

sustainable agriculture are methods to decrease the use of pesticides and other chemicals. since WWII, there has been a chemical revolution because people began to believe that chemicals can solve all of our problems. since then, many agriculture departments at universities have been established and funded by large chemical companies like Monsanto and Dow Corning. it is a very profitable relationship for them because people who get trained in these universities often go out and work for these companies and also give advice to farmers on how they should farm (by using pesticides).

these days, there is greater awareness about pesticide residue in food and the health problems that they cause. and so there is renewed interest in sustainable farming.